7 Things Teachers Should Understand About Kids These Days

I was a teacher once but I didn't really go to college to become one. If you're a teacher (and actually went to college to become one), you have probably learned the stuff I'm about to say here in the most technical sense (i.e. child psychology and whatnot). Still, I believe this stuff might help and I'm not speaking here as part of the "selfie generation". I'm speaking here as part of the Filipino now-all-grown-up, good-boys-and-girls generation of the 90s who is repulsed and saddened by how Pinoy kids turned out.

Here are the 7 Things Teachers Should Understand About Kids These Days.

1. They only care about themselves. Like I said, this is the "selfie generation". What most kids really give a rat's ass about these days are themselves, the parties they want to go to after school, their boy/girlfriends, their friends/enemies/frienemies, how they want to kill themselves just because mommy or daddy told them off and basically anything and everything that is not connected to their education. The cold, hard, painful truth is that most members of the selfie generation care way more about superficial things. I'm not saying you take it against them. You just need to understand that this is how the digital age effed-up our youngsters.
2. If you're not the good-looking or funny teacher or both, you're just another one of the daylight nightmares they have to deal with because they have to. Kids are kids and they love the nice and funny things. At one point, we have all lived in that era in our lives where everything seems to be just rainbows, butterflies and unicorns. Sometimes, we tend to be stuck in that era for a very long time. Some of us even die in it. Sadly, this generation is part of that. They crave entertainment even inside a room where serious learning should take place. As a teacher, you need to understand that teaching requires a new skill now - THEATRICALITY. Worked really well multiple times for me.
3. There is a greater chance they'd kill themselves after a breakup than after flunking a seriously major subject. The media, especially here in the Philippines, is not really doing a great job of instilling core values in our youth today. Proof? Those countless TV series that focus on teenage love and finding forever in it. And as if that's not messing things up enough, little books about the same thing are being published specifically targeted at the teenage market. Every time I set foot in a bookstore, all they have in the shelves are tiny books with ridiculously colorful covers bearing ridiculously cheesy titles. They're like Tagalog romance novels for kids between 13-18 years of age. And what saddens me the most is that kids actually swarm around those shelves like Brangelina is in town. As a result, they become obsessed with relationships at a very tender age. They develop this thinking that if they don't find "the one" now, they might end up dying alone. Which is just terrifying and infuriating at the same time.
4. What they only want to know are the stuff that could be "useful" in real life. As kids nowadays only care about stuff that are either fun or life-threatening or both, what they expect to learn in school are the "essential" things that would allow them to live a fun-or-life-threatening-or-both kind of life. Learning the Pythagorean theorem, solving for age problems and completing and interpreting a Punnett square unfortunately are not one of those things. As a result, they'd either just let you talk in class while they drift off to Neverland with their eyes wide open and pretending to focus on you or come up with a smartass counter-response to everything you have to say.
5. They're a bunch of know-it-alls. With the advent of Google and all the information-giving offspring of technology, kids these days think they already know everything and they're just going to school because they need a frickin' degree. Most of the time, they'd question you either upfront or behind your back (which is like 95% of the time). With their more "profound" understanding of technology and its uses, they already think that they are the immortal generation. If you allow them to slap you with their copy-pasted Wikipedia knowledge, they'd devour you like a Christmas ham.
6. But in truth, they don't know shit. Not knowing things easily frustrates the present generation and that's why they love Google so much. It's instant knowledge with a single click. Their idea of research is copying and pasting stuff from Wikipedia or other online sources without worrying about the gravity of plagiarism. I'm especially addressing this to the older educators out there who invested literal sweat and blood in earning their degrees. Kids these days generally have no idea what they're doing. What they do is use "new age" words to confuse their teachers especially the ones who don't know smack about the in and the new. I'd like to call this pseudo-intelligence.
7. And they still think they're better than you. I know. This is just sad.

Teaching can be a very daunting task especially if your students have the immense capability of driving you bonkers. At the end of the day, all it takes is understanding them to find a good workaround. It's just not going to be easy.

At this juncture, I would like to greet all teachers out there an advanced Happy World Teachers' Day. May you continue to be a blessing to all the difficult kids of the selfie generation and may God grant you with Herculean strength to steer them to the right direction. May you all live forever!